Food For The Machine - Anger Management Edition

We worked last Saturday (yesterday) .
One of my temp employees asked if he could leave at 9:30 in the morning.  It seems that he has to go to a series of  court-ordered "Anger Management" sessions on Saturday mornings.

Any time the government mandates that someone do something for his own good, I'm automatically skeptical, so I asked the kid if the meetings were worthwhile.  Here's what he said:

Well, you have to pay this lady $15.00, and then we sit around and smoke for about the first 30 minutes because it never starts on time.  Then this dude comes in and we sit in a circle and bullshit for a while, then somebody tells about how he was in this bar a few days ago and somebody bumped him, and how before the meetings he woulda kicked that dude's ass, but now that he's going to the meetings he didn't.
And we'll all start clappin' and shit, and some other dudes will start crying, and the counselor dude says that's really good and how we all need to keep it up.
You don't have to talk or even be awake.  The main thing is giving that lady $15.00.  

This kid could've spent most of his morning building displays for grocery stores.  Instead, he had to give his time and money to a couple of government lifers.

The more I learn about our government, the greater the likelihood that I'll be going to the Anger-Management sessions.  Sheesh.

Why I love the war on drugs

I hire a lot of ex-convicts.  Sometimes they are a bargain. 

Think about it.  Imagine a 25-year-old who would be making 50K per year in a just and fair world, based on his intelligence, computer skills, and work ethic.  But suppose he got caught up in the George Bush/Barack Obama War On Drugs because of possession of a trifling amount of a weed, and he now has some prison time on his record. 

He is now lucky to get minimum wage. 

My company pays most people a lot more than minimum, but not for employees that no one else will hire.  We sometimes can hire ex-convict geniuses for 9 bucks an hour. 

If you're willing to put up with employees having to leave work at odd hours to waste time meeting with probation officers, parole officers, government counselors and other bureaucratic pygmies, ex-cons are a bargain. 

It doesn't seem fair, does it?  I get great employees for half-price !!   Thank you Democrats !!!!

So what should be done about my unfair advantage?  Well, a nation that didn't have its head up its collective ass would legalize marijuana use and possession, along with other victimless crimes.  We have 6% of the world's population and 25% of its convicts.  We do love turning our children into Food For The Machine. 

San Francisco is now debating what to do about my discriminatory practices.  Are they going to legalize marijuana in their city?  Make it legal for entrepreneurs to sell plants without a permit?

Oh no.  Nothing like that.  They're going to leave all the current laws in place, but make it illegal for anyone to ask about convictions.  I swear to God, that's the approach they're taking.  Here's a quote from the Coyote Blog:

A legislative proposal in San Francisco seeks to make ex-cons and felons a protected class, along with existing categories of residents like African-Americans, people with disabilities and pregnant women. If passed by city supervisors, landlords and employers would be prohibited from asking applicants about their criminal past. [...]According to The City’s Human Rights Commission, San Francisco has the highest recidivism rate of any big city in California, almost 80 percent. With an influx of new prisoners set to be released because of the state’s budget crisis, supporters argue felons need legal protections before they’re disqualified simply because of their record, which could be decades old and for crimes that have nothing to do with the job they’re hoping to get.

Yep.  They're going to continue ruining lives because, after all, jailers, probation officers, parole officers, counselors, border patrol guards, Narcs, and SWAT teams need jobs.  But they're going to make it illegal to ask about it. 
I love being alive, just for moments like this.  

Food For The Machine

I have an acquaintance named James who just got sent to jail for four months.

James and I have a mutual friend named Judy, who called me yesterday, absolutely frantic. James had already gone to be an Involuntary Guest Of The State, he had no way to prepay four months’ rent on his small garage apartment, and unless Judy could find a way to get the rest of his possessions to a storage facility, everything James owned would either be dumped out on the curb or sold for back-payment of rent.
I was able to help Judy get the remainder of James’s furniture moved to a 10’x10’ storage space that she and another friend had rented. Had those two ladies not been willing to do this, James would have been released from prison owning absolutely nothing.

Think about that for a minute….starting over with a criminal record, and owning nothing. Then think of having to face a plague of counselors, probation officers, parole officers and other leeches, all with their hands in your pockets, trying to collect their Oversight Fees, payments for counseling sessions, payments for drug tests, and other legal rip-offs.

James will probably spend the rest of his life as food for this vile machine, ensuring that some Civil Service lifer is able to collect a good pension at the age of 50.

So what did James do to deserve such treatment?

Did he injure someone with his vehicle, the way Ted Kennedy did, and then leave his victim to drown?
Did he try and fail to blow up some buildings, like Bill Ayers?
Or did he drug and rape a 13-year old, like Roman Polanski?

James didn’t do anything to harm anyone else, the way those three guys did. He's only guilty of doing something that our last three presidents have done.

James was pulled over because of his license plate or inspection sticker was expired. The cops used that as an excuse to rip his car open from bumper to bumper. They finally found an ounce of marijuana and hauled James to jail.
Unlike presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, or contenders like John Kerry, Al Gore, and Sarah Palin, all of whom have smoked weed, James is in jail.
Unlike Barack Obama, who did cocaine as a teenager, James is in jail.

Chances are, you have voted for at least two of the politicians listed above. Why is it that you don’t hold drug use against presidential candidates and will support them in their efforts to be Leaders Of The Free World, but if a night-shift welder is caught with 4 joints’ worth of marijuana, you believe he should go to prison and then have to spend years explaining himself to, and being monitored by, government munchkins?

We have a higher percentage and a higher raw number of prisoners than any other country on earth. We are devastating the male African-American population for the sole purpose of “saving and creating jobs” in the counseling, drug-testing, prison-building and law enforcement industries.

Mexican drug lords are destroying their country - all for the right to be monopoly drug suppliers for the United States. The parallels between 2010 and our failed 1920's alcohol prohibition experiment are too obvious for even the most dense politician to ignore. Al Capone and a plethora of other gangsters grew wealthy supplying something that everyone wanted. Grandmothers started making their own bathtub gin. Lawlessness erupted around the border – but in this case, it was our border with Canada!

In places where we legalized alcohol, the bootlegger violence stopped. Alcohol usage didn’t skyrocket, it merely moved out into the open again, and there was no sudden increase in alcoholism.

There are only two politicians of note who are willing to go on record stating that they favor marijuana legalization – Republican Ron Paul (TX) and Democrat Jim Webb (VA).
The other politicians no longer have ignorance as an excuse. They aren’t misguided or misinformed, and they aren’t looking out For The Children®.

They are evil.

The New Jim Crow - by Michelle Alexander

* There are more African Americans under correctional control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.


* As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.


* If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas, like Chicago, have been labeled felons for life. These men are part of a growing undercaste -- not class, caste -- a group of people who are permanently relegated, by law, to an inferior second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits -- much as their grandparents and great-grandparents once were during the Jim Crow era.

Scary stuff, isn't it?

During my morning mandatory treadmill time, I watched the following C-Span interview with Michelle Alexander.

She's the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in The Age Of Colorblindness. 

The video is around 45 minutes long, and I'm posting it here for future reference.  Lord have mercy, what an indictment against our government.   



I see victims of the system every day.  They come in applying for jobs.  They've been unemployed for years.  Decades, in some cases. 
Why?  Because when they were 19 years old, they got busted for marijuana possession. 
They have a permanent mark on their record that leaves most employers unwilling to take a chance on hiring them. 
Combine that with idiotic, racist, minimum wage legislation, and Ta-Da !    You've created permanent Food For The Machine. 

Let me explain. 

We have more prisoners than any other nation - 25% of the world's total, despite having only 6% of the world's population.  According to the Michelle Alexander interview, if we were to go back to the 1970's-era incarceration rates, we would have to release 4 out of 5 prisoners currently doing time.

We have so many prisoners that we're having to privatize the cages that we're using to lock up black kids.  Ordinarily, Big Gubmint likes to run everything, but this particular growth industry is beyond them.  Marijuana prohibition creates tens of thousands of jobs, public and private. 

The prison lobby advocates building more and more cages.  (Here's a great link on the prison lobby.  Here's a more specific one on how it works in Texas.)

When the prisoners are released, many of them have to pay for part of the cost of their incarceration. 
They often have to pay for their own parole officers, counseling sessions, etc. and after talking to ex-cons for about 10 years, I'm of the opinion that most of these counselors couldn't counsel a 3-year-old to go the potty. 

If they fail to make these payments, they're either locked up again, or their paychecks are garnished.  After all, the private prison system has to be paid, right?  (Some of these private prison groups are traded on Wall Street.)

Now that you have all that info, can you explain the difference between the current system and slavery?
Do you understand why the prison lobby, in its public and private form, fights so hard to preserve the system? 

Go here to read about John Kerry, John Edwards, and John Dean's "youthful indiscretions" with marijuana use.  Go here to read about Al Gore smoking weed.  Then add George W. Bush, who affirms that he's smoked marijuana, and Barack Obama, who admits to all of the above, plus cocaine. 

What would've become of Barack Obama if he'd been locked in a cage at age 19? 

Marijuana use isn't held against presidential candidates.  So why the hell are we using it to justify creating slaves for the government? 

There's no way to rule innocent men

In addition to plowing through the recent Cedric Katesby haul o' plunder, I recently purchased Three Felonies A Day: How The Feds Target The Innocent, by Harvey A. Silvergate. 

I'm not very far into it, but the premise of the book is that government is trying to expand its power by criminalizing more and more everyday activities. 

It used to be said that "ignorance of the law is no excuse".  That maxim is now a hopelessly naive statement, as our government has written law after law after law, mostly to please various well-entrenched supporters and to increase funding for their various and sundry insane projects.

Nobody, I repeat, nobody can hope to navigate any major business project without hiring a legal, tax, environmental, or labor expert.  That's the way our government wants it to be.   

This morning's web browsing took me to a recent post by The Devil's Kitchen, on a slightly different topic.  Mr. Kitchen quotes this passage from Atlas Shrugged, on the topic of manufacturing criminals. 

"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against—then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be enforced nor objectively interpreted—and you create a nation of law-breakers—and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with.

Whether you know it or not, you are probably commiting an average of three felonies a day.  Do these crimes harm anyone? No.  But they're a good source of funding when Uncle Sam needs some more food for the machine.

President Obama - Stop The Drug Wars ! !